Darcy squinted at Fin’s lime green travel clock. It was 10 am. The sound of Russian voices in the other room, but this time he knew it was only the radio. The bedroom door was open and the apartment ice-cold; the heater had gone from full steam to freezing. Fin? He waited. Nothing.
He got up.
Snow spilled down outside the sitting-room window and the pipes that ran along the wall were barely warm. No Svetlana in the kitchen opposite. He checked on the orange laminated counter that separated the kitchen from her living area. No note, no breakfast.
He dragged a poloneck and a windcheater from his duffel bag, pulled his black cords over his thermals. White letters painted on one of the hanging black dresses, a looping script: The mysteries of the clitoris. Had that been there last night? He folded her Polaroid camera into itself, silver with inlaid wood, angles of a small architectural building, and slid it into his daypack. He grabbed some cheese-sticks from the fridge and an apple, ventured into the corridor. She’d left him no keys but at least she hadn’t locked him in.
He tested the door; he was now locked out.
Triangular stains on the walls the shapes of sconces, but no hall-watcher lurking at the dark end. He ate as he moved down the stairs and found the main entrance, the one they’d circumvented last night. Steel-rimmed swinging doors, glassed and unattended, an empty desk and chair. Why hadn’t she left a note?
Outside everything seemed bleak and deciduous, even the buildings were bare, the street covered in dove-grey snow, an arctic beauty. Darcy’d never seen a city so bathed in snow, was surprised by its silence—squat figures in fur walked with their heads down past the bleached alabaster structures. He decided to head back to the Byelorussian Station and try to retrieve his passport, see about his Pentax. Maybe that’s where she was. But as he examined his plastic foldout map it seemed too far to walk and the wind was like an icepick. He’d hail a taxi.
Out on the slush-covered boulevard a trolley bus passed, whining on its overhead wires; if only he knew where it was going. He turned to get his bearings. The distant Ferris wheel rose above the leafless trees in Gorky Park as promised, a couple of bundled-up bodies suspended in air, small as frozen peas. In spring it might have held a certain beauty but the cold had crept deep into his feet already, through the sheepskin lining of his combat boots. He wasn’t bred for this, his skin and his blood were too thin, and the station suddenly seemed too difficult.
Across the street the low swinging gates of a local park that wasn’t Gorky, empty but for an elderly baba pushing at snow with a wooden scraper, a keeper of paths in the frost-bitten wind. He could take a picture of her in the avenue of bare elm branches that umbrellaed the pathway. Surely that wasn’t strategic. But as he reached for the camera a man glanced back at him nervously. Darcy wondered if this could be his shadower, but he led a narrow dog in a quilted tartan blanket, a whippet or miniature greyhound, the type Darcy imagined being walked by a gay man in New York, not a KGB agent. The man glanced back again. Striking aquiline features, dark for here, late thirties, slender-lipped and earnest in his horn-rimmed specs. Darcy heard Fin’s words: Be careful, the places you go. He heard his own promise but the intrigue already flitted about his consciousness, luring him like a finger seeking its hook inside his mouth, and he’d barely stepped out the door. He tried focusing elsewhere but the man loitered near a bench, averting his eyes, then he stared furtively. Intellectual, Jewish perhaps, thought Darcy, if you could still be Jewish here. He remembered the Spartacus Gay Guide only listed ‘outside the Bolshoi in summer’ under ‘Cruising in Moscow’, and warned against it. But it was winter now and this wasn’t the Bolshoi. The man removed his fur hat and Darcy received it as a signal. His hair was silver-flecked and wavy, a few strands flew up like a crest in the wind and the pleading in his eyes spoke a need that Darcy recognised, mirrored. Too cold to be hatless and waiting unless you wanted something badly.
The shivering whippet sat on the path like a statue, its head into the wind as if it were a dog at sea. Darcy waited for the man to make a next move but he seemed stricken with uncertainty, so Darcy, emboldened by nothing but a rush in his brain, turned off the track into a thicket of prickly evergreens. He realised he wasn’t so cold anymore as he pulled off a glove and held it under his arm and the man began fumbling, tying the windswept dog to the bench. He began to pick his way through the icy branches but as Darcy unzipped himself a figure approached, obscured by foliage. With neither a word nor a smile the Russian was panicking, backing away through the trees. Darcy shook his head—it was only the babushka, she couldn’t see them—but the man was already scaling a low metal barrier. Hands deep in pockets, he leaned into the wind and half ran towards the road. He’d forgotten his dog.
The baba, buried in her coat and scarves, sat down on the bench where the dog was tied. The woman looked over at Darcy as he appeared from the trees, narrowed her sunken eyes into their creases. Seduced and abandoned, said Darcy, then he remembered Fin’s other warning. Don’t trust anyone here.
The dog’s tail curled under its crouching loins, its pelt a brindled silver. It greeted Darcy cautiously as he felt the ridges of its spine through the blanket. He pulled out the camera and unfolded it, took a close-up of the dog’s fine face, one ear forward, one back, then a second, better one, with its head slightly cocked and both ears pricked. It had no tag on its collar—Darcy wasn’t even sure if they did that here.
He flapped the Polaroids dry and the woman looked over, confused but unmoved. She had a postcard face, so he took a photo of her too, felt a certain guilt about his foreigner’s presumption. At least she wasn’t a bridge or a reservoir; still she shot him a look of distaste that chilled him.
With the whippet on its lead by his side Darcy felt less foreign, as if this could have been his city. Together, they walked through the snow-fleeced park to the wrought-iron arch at the main entrance. A woman in a woollen balaclava was opening the flap on an old yellow van. She uncovered a row of red sausages on buns. Darcy reached for his wallet but the dog lifted a paw, its leg as fine as a knitting needle, and began to whine, snatching at the leash and pulling. Darcy felt conspicuous. He caught sight of the delicate man in the distance, returning, and Darcy unclipped the lead, let the whippet loose before it barked. It rippled across the frosted ground, galloping low like a racing dog, and the man leaned down to greet it. Darcy gazed at them, suddenly alone, the fine leather dog leash in his hand.